Figuratively speaking

Wednesday

Mar 3, 2010 at 6:00 AM

By Nancy Sheehan Photography by Tom Rettig

Artist Carrie Nixon is a fan of the human form, and it didn’t take her long to figure out where to show her work in Worcester. The Midwestern native has lived here only 18 months and already has had a show at Assumption College, where she teaches drawing and painting as an associate professor. She plans to apply for a solo show through ARTSWorcester this year and a new exhibition, titled “Nudes and Figures,” is open now at the Dark World Gallery in Worcester. “If I have a show, it motivates me to really get disciplined,” she said. “It forces me to get really immersed in my work, and it’s also a way to meet other artists.”

She has also met a lot of other artists by attending figure drawing classes two and sometimes three times a week in Worcester, Waltham and Boston.

Nixon grew up in Detroit and later lived in Ohio, where she taught drawing at the University of Cincinnati for 18 years. “I was tenured there. I was teaching drawing to design students. They had a very good program that had a co-op and everything,” she said.

So why did she pull up stakes after nearly two decades?

“I wanted to be in a fine arts program — studio art,” she said. “Design is more commercially oriented.” She would have moved on sooner, but chose to stay put for her daughter, now a senior in college. “I was waiting for my daughter to grow up because her Dad is there,” she said.

In the winter of 2008, she began applying for jobs in places where she felt she would like to live. “I was intrigued by Massachusetts,” she said. “I wanted to get back to this latitude, which is the same as Detroit. Summers are deadly hot in Cincinnati. I wanted to be either near the ocean or near the Great Lakes. I didn’t know much about Worcester, but I looked it up and it was near Boston and it was a city.” And Assumption hired her, which cinched the deal.

Nixon also has taught at Wayne State University in Detroit and Raritan Valley College in Somerville, N.J. She has a bachelor’s degree in art from Yale University and an MFA in drawing from Wayne State. She has exhibited extensively in the Midwest and Northeast, including at Allan Stone Gallery in New York, the Peace Museum in Chicago, and at several universities and colleges in New Jersey, Ohio and Michigan.

Her art-related employment hasn’t only been teaching jobs, however. She also has worked as a courtroom artist for Channel 7 in Detroit, done scientific drawings of the dissection of an elephant, and assisted noted muralist Robert Dafford on large outdoor historical murals.

Through it all, the human figure has held her interest. “I’ve always drawn the figure,” she said. “It’s very evocative. It can evoke peaceful ideas, it can evoke erotic ideas, it can be about strength.”

In her latest series, she also is interested in the effect of color against a black background. “It creates a mood — just by the fact of it being color — how the red ends up looking somewhat demonic and how the blue is more melancholy or thoughtful.”

Much of the work in her Assumption show centered on her students as well as other artists or musicians absorbed in their work. “I am an artist and I teach art, so I am surrounded by people making art,” she said. “I’m interested in creativity and also that kind of focus that artists develop as they work.”

A standout painting from that show is of a young carpenter who works down the hall from Nixon’s studio at 75 Webster St., Worcester, a converted factory that affords work spaces for artists, wood shops, dance studios and other small businesses.

“I did that from a photo I took of him. Otherwise, he would have had to pose for dozens of hours,” Nixon said.

The work is done in only two colors, brown with pale lavender highlights. “I was interested in a limited palette because I wanted to emphasize the value — the dark and light — and the texture more than the color in this one.”

That effort succeeds with strong textural detail from the carpenter’s highly toned muscles to the exposed brick walls in his workshop.

“It wasn’t started as a Jesus. It was just started as a carpenter, but I felt that he had an almost beatific expression — and he is nice looking, too — he was so focused on what he was doing,” she said.

“The funny thing is that, at Assumption, the nuns especially liked this one. I thought that was pretty cute.”